The Final Frontier: How Copenhagen Suborbitals Took Off

It’s no mistake that a New York Times headline from last September read "Space Tourism is Here". While the human race has already reached the final frontier, the majority of people have probably never ventured into space, let alone traveled beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With the recent upspring of private companies focused on building crafts for human space flight and new developments in technologies and composite materials, SolidWorks has been able to lend a hand towards helping companies like Copenhagen Suborbitals.

Designing an open-source manned space rocket and capsule for suborbital space flight, Copenhagen Suborbitals believes that the sky is the limit, quite literally. Eager to share his story, Kristian von Bengtson, founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, blogs regularly for Wired magazine. Some of you SolidWorks fans may even notice that his models and simulations are pulled from our software.

Using SolidWorks Professional, SolidWorks Premium, and SolidWorks Flow Simulation, Copenhagen Suborbitals has built the capsule geometry, exported the drawings for laser cutting, and conducted FEM analysis of structures to see if they meet flight requirements. SolidWorks, combined with sketching capabilities, is one of the most important tools in the early research and development phase and the production phases of von Bengtson’s project.